Our beautiful village is located a bit far away from the western sea and the beach. Actually its not a coastal village but yet some villagers travel to the western coastal beach to purchase fresh fish and dried fish to sell for the other surrounding villages. There are few who sun dry the fish in their own compounds as well. Our brother brought 4 sets of dried prawns from a neighbouring vendor. The prawns are jumbo in size and they might not get dried quickly. Two sets of prawns are suppose to get dried more until the correct consistency. Since I needed to dry them, I mixed all the required spices, tamarind paste and applied to half dried prawns and kept it outside to sun dry it for one whole day. When tamarind and salt mixed together, the mixture can be used to preserve food items without even drying them fully. This paste gives a very pleasant taste and a smell to the prawns. Usually once the prawns dries, they are been kept on the smoker above the hearth to get hot smoke regularly which keeps them preserved for long time.

Since the dried prawns were brought early in the morning, I made a devilled mix from water spinach with dried prawns for the lunch. The cucumber white curry that was been made, went very well with the rice. Since brother love dried fish/prawns, I started to pounded very hot and spicy bird chilli coconut sambol as well. Yet he makes such a big fuss to pick few purple bird eye chillies to the sambol that I made specially for him. Finally I went to pick some bird eye chillies while letting him to make his own sambol. Sometimes it’s very difficult to get something done through him.

I soaked few varieties of legumes the previous night to make a mix legume stir-fry dish for the next day breakfast. On top of cowpea, mung beans, green peas, corn seeds, velvet beans, kidney beans, I added some chickpeas to be soaked as well. Once the well soaked legumes are boiled, the quantity becomes a lot. I mixed the tempered mustard seeds and bird chilies in ghee and added to the boiled legumes to give a rich taste. I burnt the previous day marinated and sun dried 4 prawns In hot coal and mixed them with the legume dish. Since I crushed all the dried prawns, added when tempering the legume mix got nicely incorporated with each lentil, giving such a taste buds tingling taste. So I made a very delicious and very spicy legume breakfast and since there were plenty to go around, I quickly took some to elder Aunty’s house too.